Japanese Textbooks, Continued

April 4, 2007

Yasuhiro Nakasone, a former prime minister who is Abe's staunch ally, recently denied what he wrote in 1978. In a memoir about his Imperial Navy experiences in Indonesia, titled "Commander of Three Thousand Men at Age Twenty-Three," he wrote that some of his men "started attacking local women or became addicted to gambling."

"For them, I went to great pains, and had a comfort station built," Nakasone wrote, using the euphemism for a military brothel.

But in a meeting with foreign journalists a week ago, Nakasone, now 88, issued a flat denial. He said he had actually set up a "recreation center," where his men played Japanese board games like go and shogi.